The only toilets out at Kata Tjuta, also known as the Olgas, are long-drops at the sunset viewing area. They stink. This is not surprising since water is in short supply.
At Uluru itself there seems to be one permanent waterhole called Mutitjulu. This is a sheltered recess in the south side of the rock and the water source is the rock itself. When it rains a significant part of the rock drains to exactly this location. Indeed, heavy rain is said to create a waterfall.
Eighteen kilometres north of Uluru is the town of Yulara. The town gets its water from an aquifer and I mention this because nearly everything else has to be brought in from elsewhere. This piqued my curiosity when I visited recently. How does a town in the middle of the desert keep itself running?
Indeed how stuff is actually organised and run is something I’ve long found interesting. I’ve never studied it formally and I doubt I ever will. But for instance, while the highlight of the festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, is each morning’s bull run, the cleaning and hosing of the streets after the first night’s drunken partying is something to behold. The organisers know exactly what they’re doing.
In Yulara’s case, the town exists so that tourists visiting Uluru have somewhere to stay. Everything is expensive and I assume that this is because tourist money pays for it all. There are approximately 910 people working in the area and they need electricity, water, gas and food. As with any community, these things must either be produced locally or brought in.
Water, as I said above, is sourced locally. There is also a solar array spread across five different locations in and around town that produces 15% of the town’s electricity needs. The rest comes via generators. The town is too small and far from anything to be connected to a grid.
But what about other things? Food for example? The answer is that there’s no agriculture in the area so everything, as I said above, has to be brought in.
And this explains some of the expense. Twice a week there are three truckloads of goods from Adelaide, 1663km away. That’s how the town is supplied.
This in turn explains why the local IGA, the only supermarket in town, is dominated by South Australian produce. Farmer’s Union Iced Coffee can now be found in supermarkets throughout Australia but neither Perth’s nor Melbourne’s stock the “strong” variety. Likewise, soft drinks like Sno-Drop and Big Sars are South Australian peculiars but can be found at Yulara.
So does the town make money? I concluded that it must do or it wouldn’t survive. The hotel prices in town are probably kept high to ensure profitability.
And as long as Uluru remains, I expect that that will continue.
